Use Arel for SQL construction

[dmitry]

No description provided.

[dmitry]

@batter

Build is failed because of the database_cleaner and the ruby 1.8 version. It's not supported anymore: DatabaseCleaner/database_cleaner@8e448be (database_cleaner 1.3.0 released yesterday)

Everything else is in a good working condition.

[batter]

Thanks for the pull request. Is there an advantage to using Arel for sql construction, or is it just cleaner syntax? I like it, just curious about what the pros & cons are if there are any.

[dmitry]

Basically there are two things Arel is used for (from the Arel readme):

• Simplifies the generation of complex SQL queries
• Adapts to various RDBMSes

In my case I want paper_trail to be more cleaner and database agnostic.

I only know one drawback: performance is a little lower, but not really much.

[batter]

@dmitry - Thanks again for the PR. I took most of your changes and implemented them when possible but condensed some syntax and took out some of the unnecessary changes in 4601926. I hope you approve.

I like to leave calls from one method to another method that is defined within the same module predicated with self. to indicate that the method is defined on the same module. I also like to check not just for truthiness, but also that an argument actually is true or false when checking to see if an argument is receiving one of those (to ensure the user actually intends for that boolean factor to be triggered) and avoid any possible confusion when a method gets invoked. Hope that makes sense. 😃

[dmitry]

@batter ok, didn't knew about coding style. Hope some day to be one of the contributers to a paper_trail ;)

[batter]

Well I'll add you to the README list of contributors since you are a contributor. I wanted to grab your actual commit but since I rejected a good portion of the changes you had made to that commit, I didn't want to merge it and revert since that would mess up the git history for the file... Not sure if I could've just grabbed the commit and manually undid those and then re-committed it... but at any rate, you're a contributor in my book! Thanks again.